The internet doesn’t need your opinion on everything w/ Rebecca Solnit (Transcript)

[00:00:00] Rebecca Solnit: 

I think we know ourselves through our conversations. Our, our deepest selves exist in relationship in some ways and not through, you know, our 240 character opinions tossed out to be snapped up or spit out by strangers.

[00:00:18] Adam Grant: 

Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to ReThinking my podcast on the science of what makes us tick with the TED Audio Collective. I'm an organizational psychologist and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

My guest today is writer and activist, Rebecca Solnit. Rebecca's, a writer's writer, a true master of turning thoughts into wise words and ideas into evocative essays. 

[00:00:46] Rebecca Solnit: 

I joke that I don't think in in catchphrases. I think in paragraphs. This is a very short sentence. Colon, I like complexity. 

[00:00:56] Adam Grant: 

She's published 25 books on power change, feminism and history, including Hope in the Dark, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, and Men Explain Things to Me, which is self-explanatory.

Her Lit Hub columns are must read. And today we're digging into how to engage in the kinds of meaningful conversations Rebecca excels at.

Rebecca, what a treat to meet you. 

[00:01:25] Rebecca Solnit: 

Lovely to meet you. Hello across the continent. 

[00:01:28] Adam Grant: 

I've been so looking forward to this. I think probably in the last five years I've read six or seven different articles and thought I wish I could write like that. And then notice they were all by you. 

[00:01:41] Rebecca Solnit: 

Thank you. 

[00:01:42] Adam Grant: 

So I wanted to start by talking about online comments since you wrote so hilariously about them recently.

Um, I guess my opening question is. Why do you think online conversation is so dumb? 

[00:01:56] Rebecca Solnit: 

We're really trying to respond to complex things without the time or space to do it properly. People feel that, you know, you come dressed in an opinion to social media, you're naked without one, and something about social media has made people feel that they're entitled to have an opinion about everything, whether or not they have any facts about it.

And I see that all the time that people both feel that they need to make a statement about absolutely everything, and that they don't necessarily need to understand it in any substantial way. Augmented, of course, by the fact that so many people don't really know the difference between a reliable source and a sloppy rumor or misrepresentation.

And I also think so much of our behavior is imitative and people imitate each other and these become the norms. And social media has just normalized both strong opinions with low information and easy attacks on people you've never met and haven't really figured out. 

[00:03:09] Adam Grant: 

There's a phrase that became popular a while back in Silicon Valley of, “Strong opinions weakly held.”

And at first I thought that was a, an interesting idea because if you can, you could express a strong opinion, then you would often elicit a strong reaction from somebody else, and you would both sharpen your arguments and your thinking as long as you are willing to change your mind. And I do think that works in a close relationship where people know that expressing opinion strongly doesn't necessarily mean you're unwilling to change them, but we take that norm over to the internet and an opinion strongly expressed, sounds exactly like an opinion strongly held, and there's no signal that you might have some openness to rethinking your view.

[00:03:53] Rebecca Solnit: 

I think if you don't strongly hold an opinion, then you know, you haven't really committed to it. You're kind of sleeping around with ideas. You're having one night stands or whatever, booty calls with something that you know, somehow augments your identity or is fun to say. But the other thing is talking to people you know and trust often means talking to people where it's safe to be wrong. 

And one of the things about the internet that I have certainly experienced myself is people are pretty convinced that being wrong is a capital crime. One of the strongest motives behind what people believe or believe they believe is belonging.

That you want to hold the ideas of the group you want to belong to. And so you rush to show that you're on the right side of your version of history or current affairs, or that you're with these oppressed people and against the, the oppressors and that kind of in-group identity demonstration often requires simple binaries.

These people are entirely good. These people are entirely evil. This person who made a joke in 1978 that we now consider an inappropriate framing of race or gender or orientation or ability, is now an utterly evil person. And so much of my life and my writing has been about complexity, nuance, a world in full color, at least shades of gray, and the 240 characters of Twitter, the little spaces, the of Facebook, et cetera, really encourage, I think, sloppy thinking, oversimplification, and again, people swapping opinions as part of their kind of artillery and their identity. 

And I think that's in some ways, a kind of artificial way to live and not a particularly good one.

[00:05:55] Adam Grant: 

I thought for a long time that a basic problem with online conversation was we were dehumanizing the people we were interacting with. You don't see the face of strangers. They're two dimensional, uh, they don't have a full identity, and as a result, we don't have this same level of politeness and respect that we would if we were talking to them in person.

Then I read this research in political psychology, which suggests that that's not as consequential as we think that the bigger problem in online conversation is that trolls use aggression to get attention, and the very behavior that would lead them to be ostracized offline in real life because it would be considered rude, is actually rewarded online, and that actually then draws in more trolls and changes social norms over time.

[00:06:43] Rebecca Solnit: 

I think we all would benefit from less online time, and there's certainly plenty of evidence for that. I try and model civil behavior, and I will certainly say pretty harsh things about a powerful public figure who's doing harm, but I, I'm not out there to crush the 23-year-old who doesn't fully understand 1947 or is repeating something they heard.

[00:07:10] Adam Grant: 

I think that this speaks to a, maybe a broader opportunity to rethink norms on social media altogether, and I think you addressed one of them. Just so cleverly in your post, you wrote that quote, “Every expression of concern is in fact, an expression of unconcern about something else.” Talk to me about that because this drives me crazy.

[00:07:32] Rebecca Solnit: 

I joke that there's always someone to say that your effort to save the whales proves you don't care about trans kids, or your efforts to save trans kids proves you don't care about whales. And it partly comes out of this punitiveness, and I think there's something very puritanical in our culture. It's certainly very powerful on social media.

That fact that people allocate to themselves, to right, to punish other people for being flawed, wrong, incorrect, politically incorrect, et cetera, is really striking. And it's like when did you become the police? Who handed you the right to try and harm this person? Et cetera, and it's done so casually and sloppily often.

It's really striking. 

[00:08:17] Adam Grant: 

There's an overgeneralization where people think, “Yes, of course you can start to understand what people care about from what they say.” That doesn't mean you can know what they value from what they don't say. Often silence is is not a lack of care. It's a lack of information or a lack of efficacy.

[00:08:34] Rebecca Solnit: 

And I know as somebody who writes about violence against women and has for almost 40 years, that a lot of women may not speak up because their experience has been so traumatizing and or they're still living in terror. I have talked to a number of women who live in hiding because their abusive former partner is still trying to find them and kill them.

Um, I've also been a confidant for stories women aren't willing to tell in public. Or seeing women because they feel that the climate has changed and they might be believed for the first time. Speak up for the first time. And we saw that in a very public way with #MeToo. So sometimes people don't speak up because they care so deeply and because they're so deeply impacted.

Or they may just feel, you know me joining the chorus is not how the world gets saved. Another thing I said in that Lit Hub column is that one of the weird rules of social media is that everything you say and do happens on social media. You may in fact be donating large sums of money, having very meaningful private conversations. 

Be supporting someone who's doing something important on the issue. Be married to someone who's doing something on the issue, but the only thing they'll measure is whether you've said something on Twitter or Facebook or whatever, particularly Twitter, where there's feels like because there's less ability to control your interactions and because Twitter has always been a kind of bad faith institution, there's just such a habit of that kind of bullying.

[00:10:13] Adam Grant: 

You are making me think about whether we should actually rethink our ideas of hypocrisy. Historically, in a pre-internet age, it made sense to, you know, to maybe gently point out if someone, you know was, was passionate about a principle in one situation, and then violating that principle in another. 

But when it comes to speaking up and using your platform, given the, the complexity of global, the globalized world, given the number of issues that are going on in the world at any given time, given the amount of access we have to information, um, it's almost impossible not to be a hypocrite by that standard today.

[00:10:55] Rebecca Solnit: 

I think there's two different things there. On the one hand, you can't be involved with everything. You can't be an expert on everything. I absolutely defend that. You don't have to speak up about, um everything. On the other hand, if you care about the human rights of group X, but you're justifying the abuse of human rights of group Y or you know, or whitewashing human rights abusers in another category, that is kind of a problem.

And there's also the question of. What are the ways of telling people that maybe they should look harder at their own positions or look more deeply into what's going on? Reconsider what they've said, that don't shut people down, because that's one of the things about the punitive insecurity of the internet.

You know, if one of my friends says to me, I really want you to rethink that, then I know that they're still my friend. It's in good faith, and they're gonna let me actually change my position as opposed to people who don't actually want you to become a more thoughtful person. I, I'm old enough. I remember a radically different world in which I think people spent a lot more time with each other in person. 

We were just more socially connected and felt more supported, and we also didn't have these weird little semi-public or public lives with strangers able to go after us at any, you know, about anything. Growing up in the eighties and nineties, I feel like people respected, valued, just hanging out. 

I often feel now that people kind of feel like we have to have a very specific kind of transactional reason to get together. We're gonna do something very specific. I'm gonna cook a meal for you, or we're gonna go do this thing, or we need to talk about this very specific thing.

Even in the people around me, I've seen friendships fall apart. Because people seem very brittle, unable to deal with discomfort, disagreement, difficulty that I feel they might have, you know, a decade or two earlier, been much more able to tolerate, resolve, et cetera. So, I almost feel that we're changing as a species.

There was a book about the internet many years ago called The Shallows, and I do feel we're not living in the depth of our own introspection enough, and we're not living in the depth of true human connection enough. And online, there's a space in between where you're not in deep connection with your deepest authentic self, where you can be vulnerable, where you can be unsure, where you can find out what you really think through conversation.

And you're not necessarily spending a lot of time alone. And I feel in my own life, I miss some of the depth I had. I'm, I'm a writer. I used to write letters, and when email first appeared, it was just like writing letters and I had these wonderful correspondences. I have one friend. We wrote that 7,000 emails over the course of a decade.

It was like keeping a journal or a diary in a sense. It was a back and forth diary. I had a romance where we wrote 50,000 words of email, and I miss that. I don't have anyone in my life who I can write letters to, who will write back. And so that part of me is kind of withered. And I saw Joyce Carol Oates, who's I think in her eighties say on Twitter, I think it was the last person who wrote her letters had passed away.

The last people who would just call her up on the phone just to chat. You know, were fading away. And so I think that there is this steep loneliness created by this deep isolation of the way we've reorganized our lives. Pushed on by social media and the internet. And I think one of the underlying truths is when you and your friend hang out in person or talk on the phone.

Well, the landline, you know, local anyway, nobody's making money off it the way they are when you're yelling at each other on social media. With the popup ads, they make money off us being online. They don't make money off us being, um, you know, in person.

[00:15:22] Adam Grant: 

I wondered if you might be up for a lightning round. What is the worst advice you've ever gotten? 

[00:15:28] Rebecca Solnit: 

Forgive this person who hasn't stopped doing the thing that is pretty unforgivable. 

[00:15:34] Adam Grant: 

What's the saying that the best apology is changed behavior? 

[00:15:37] Rebecca Solnit: 

There has been so much terrible advice in my life, and including people who had very low ambitions for me, people who told me that I just needed to adapt to violence against women by cutting my hair off, learning martial arts, buying a gun, never leaving the house alone, moving to the suburbs.

So, that's kind of a fascinating question because somebody could write a whole book about the bad advice they've been given personally. 

[00:16:04] Adam Grant: 

I would read that book if you wrote it. I know that.

[00:16:08] Rebecca Solnit: 

I think it might want to be an essay. 

[00:16:10] Adam Grant: 

I will look forward to reading it whenever you're ready 

[00:16:13] Rebecca Solnit: 

And, and look how incapable of shortness I am.

But more lightning. You do lightning. I'll do thunder. 

[00:16:21] Adam Grant: 

I'll take the thunder any day. This is always the risk of imposing a lightning round on somebody who's so eloquent. So, what is something that you've rethought lately? 

[00:16:30] Rebecca Solnit: 

Oh gosh. My sense of human nature remains positive in many respects, but that so many people are most deeply driven to belong to whatever the in-group, the dominant group is, has really compromised my sense of human nature.

I believe that I get points for one sentence, but it was a Rebecca sentence and that it had dependent clauses and was rather long. 

[00:16:58] Adam Grant: 

I will say I have come to appreciate the art form in thinking in paragraphs and writing in sound bites occasionally, but let's not overdo it. 

[00:17:08] Rebecca Solnit: 

And I have said things that have become aphorisms, like “Voting as a chess move, not a valentine.” But they often only appear in the course of writing paragraphs and essays or books. 

[00:17:23] Adam Grant: 

I'll, I'll let you interpret this one how you want, but I'm interested in your current hot take. It could be an unpopular opinion, a rant or a hill you're willing to die on. 

[00:17:33] Rebecca Solnit: 

We can exit the age of fossil fuels. We have the solutions. We know exactly what to do.

We just have to overcome the obstacles, which is no small task. 

[00:17:43] Adam Grant: 

All right. That's hopeful and maybe a segway to the next question, which is, what's a prediction you have for the future? 

[00:17:50] Rebecca Solnit: 

It will not be like the present, despite what people say, history is full of surprises and people who predict the future, assuming it will just enlarge on some very obvious aspect of the present, are missing those surprises.

[00:18:05] Adam Grant: 

What is your favorite non-obvious writing tip? 

[00:18:09] Rebecca Solnit: 

Write about what you don't know because you're always learning. I've always hated that. Write about what you know, which seems to really put a fence around people. And you know, my training was as a journalist, which was training in how to find things out, how to learn more about something and my books have so often been an opportunity to learn more about George Orwell or the 19th century California or cartography, or how human beings really behave in the aftermath of a disaster. 

You know, and I love this life of discovery that writing for a living has turned out to be. I think it's what people read books for.

If you don't read to find out what you already know, why would you only write about what you know? 

[00:18:56] Adam Grant: 

Okay final item is giving you the floor from the lightning round. What's the question you have for me? 

[00:19:03] Rebecca Solnit: 

What makes you hopeful right now? 

[00:19:05] Adam Grant: 

I think that something that gives me hope right now is seeing how many people have not lost hope, even when they're in the midst of extremely trying times when they're responsible for solving problems of impossible scale.

And I think if they have hope, the rest of us can manage it too. 

[00:19:25] Rebecca Solnit: 

The historian of Eastern Europe, Timothy Snyder had his 20 Rules for Surviving Authoritarianism, and one of the really memorable ones was, “dD not surrender prematurely. I don't decide the regime is gonna stop you from doing something and then stop doing it.”

And I love that more broadly. I do see a lot of people who surrender prematurely in that we can never win. It's too late, nobody cares way. And then often I think for those of us who live safe and comfortable lives, excuses, doing nothing. It also consigns them to a pretty bleak worldview and a kind of isolation.

And I don't even think we should surrender maturely, let alone prematurely. I really respect the people who go down fighting and if things get really hairy, and most of us have, you know, here in the United States have a lot of things we can do about we care about the things we care about, believe in, and the people who don't surrender.

The people who believe we can do something about these human rights, we can do something about the climate crisis. We can do something about democracy. We can do something about misinformation are my heroes and they're everywhere. 

[00:20:42] Adam Grant: 

You're, you're reminding me of Emily Dickinson's line that, “Hope is the thing with feathers.”

And, uh, I don't know that I, I should ever be interpreting poetry, but as a psychologist, one of the, the messages I took away from that line was, uh, that despair is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and so is hope. 

[00:21:02] Rebecca Solnit: 

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Uh, people confuse hope for optimism, and that distinction has been really important for me.

Optimism for me is the same thing as pessimism, cynicism, defeatism, despair. It assumes it knows what's gonna happen. I've taken to calling that upper middle class peasant fatalism. The assumption that since the future has already been decided, there's, we don't have to do anything. And I think for those of us, again, living in the global North in comfortable homes, lives relative security.

It's a luxury we're giving up on behalf of the people who don't have that security and luxury. The people who will die, be dispossessed starved because of runaway climate change if we do nothing, et cetera. Whereas hope for me is just the sense that the future is uncertain and another face of uncertainty is possibility.

We can realize those possibilities if we throw our heart and our intellect into it and despair is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I also think it's very much part of loneliness. I see around climate people who don't have a lot of information, who decide we're doomed. There's nothing we can do. It's too late.

We don't have the solutions. Nobody cares. But then at the heart of it, and I spent a lot of time around climate organizers, climate scientists, climate organizers, climate journalists and experts. They're take it tremendously seriously. They know how terrible the consequences have already been and will continue to be.

They also know the radical difference between the best case and worst case scenario, so that it all depends on what we do in the next several years. I have had one terrible medical diagnosis and then I went and researched the hell out of it, which people mostly do with terrible medical diagnoses, but if you diagnose the whole planet as doomed, but don't then go do some research on it. 

I ki I don't, at some level, I don't fully understand that. Look deeper, look harder, find out who's really at the heart of this question, and you'll see that actually they haven't given up and they're not despairing. So, that's one of the strange things I'm trying to understand better as part of my climate work.

[00:23:17] Adam Grant: 

I have an issue with two extremes that seem to be the norm. Uh, and I think you've given us a, a very compelling third option that I wanna give you a chance to talk about a little bit. I think on one extreme, um, there's something that I might think of as delusional growth mindset, which is a belief that every person is capable of every kind of change.

[00:23:38] Rebecca Solnit: 

Mm-hmm. 

[00:23:38] Adam Grant: 

Or any kind of change. 

[00:23:40] Rebecca Solnit: 

And then it's their fault if they don't do it. 

[00:23:42] Adam Grant: 

And worse yet, that they're gonna change the way I want when I expect them to. 

[00:23:46] Rebecca Solnit: 

Oh yeah, I have that boyfriend. I'm joking, but, but really.

[00:23:50] Adam Grant: 

Sorry. I hope it's over. 

[00:23:52] Rebecca Solnit: 

Oh, you know, it is. Yeah. 

[00:23:56] Adam Grant: 

Well, the, maybe the, the version of the other poll that I see most often is when people tell you who they are, believe them.

I'm like, well, they're telling you who they are today and maybe who they were yesterday. That's not necessarily their destiny. You don't know that's who they're gonna be tomorrow. And I, I find that view as problematic as, as the other extreme. And it, it sounds like you do too. And I, I wanted to to ask you, how do we find a healthy middle ground in the complexity of hoping for the possibility of change, but also recognizing that it doesn't always happen?

[00:24:32] Rebecca Solnit: 

One of the things I've taken to saying lately is categories are where thoughts go to die, and what you're describing is something I see all the time. People, I think, are frightened by the uncertainty of the future and the confusing nature of the world around us, which has probably never been more confusing where subject to far more information overload than we ever were before.

We have access to more different versions of reality. We think we're supposed to have in opinions about all of it. And the first thing about when people show you who they are, believe them is most people don't entirely know who they really are in good ways and bad ways. A lot of people do terrible things without fully understanding what they're doing.

A lot of people don't know how strong they're they'll be in an emergency or a crisis. Again, anybody who's had anything terrible happen to them, whether it's a terrible diagnosis, a major injury, a huge loss. Has had that experience of being surprised at who shows up and who doesn't show up among the people around them who is capable of meeting them in a moment of devastation and who will throw life pate, platitudes, useless advice, or just not show up at all.

And so we don't always know who we really are. We often find out. In an extreme situation, but what I think is at the heart of these two polls is that there is a, human nature is a wide open category. Another one of my go-to aphorisms is categories are leaky. Mostly when we're talking about human behavior, we're in the leaky category zone.

Some people are like this, but some people aren't. Some people are capable of change, but some aren't. And then the real question between those two polls is what kind of people can change in under what circumstances? And you know, which allows us to acknowledge some people can't change in fundamental ways.

Some people can, but under the right circumstances. Or in certain ways, but not others. And I've changed so much in my lifetime, which has made it easy for me to recognize that people change. I've found new tools. You know, I had a very difficult childhood, which I survived by being very shut down. I'm less shut down.

I was very voiceless as a kid, and it was an era where people didn't listen to girls. And now I have a international public voice and, um, the world itself has changed in such power powerful ways about who gets listened to, who gets believed, what we understand about who tells the truth and who lies and who's worth listening to.

The profundity of change in my lifetime, I think is when I'm 62, is often underestimated. I met a woman a few years ago whose mother was one of the first women to sit on a jury in Texas. 'Cause Texas had all male, male juries, which were probably, in most cases all white juries until not not that long ago, and anybody nowadays can understand how bringing a case of domestic violence, rape, job discrimination, racial injustice before an all white, all male jury would not make you feel hopeful about the outcome if you were black, if you were female, et cetera.

So that profound change has given me so much hope that individual people can change and do change. And that societies can change because our society is so profoundly different than the one I was born into. This is where my hope comes from. I can't see the future, but I can see the past and in it, I can both see profound change and see that often.

Mostly the good stuff was brought about by people, ordinary people, organizing and shifting ideas. And by the power of ideas themselves, the stuff that you and I work with, that good ideas can at the beginning be seen as extreme, unreasonable, impossible, unrealistic. And then whether it's the end of slavery, votes for women, marriage equality, environmental protection.

They come to pass. I know in 2020 for so much of what's good in the world around me is because of things people were doing in 1974. I know the good things in 2074 depend on what we do now, even though I can't know how it, how it will turn out, what it will look like, and that I know ability I actually find gives me a confidence that certainty never could.

[00:29:11] Adam Grant: 

What also is striking to me about this exercise of looking at the past is on a personal level, you know, you're not the exact same person you were 10 years ago. 

[00:29:21] Rebecca Solnit: 

Yes. 

[00:29:21]Adam Grant:

You've evolved in your opinions, your values, your habits, and. That forces you to realize that others can too. 

[00:29:30] Rebecca Solnit: 

Yeah. 

[00:29:30] Adam Grant: 

But they may not do it on your timeline or your direction.

We've been talking about uncertainty, but I have very high confidence that this was, uh, a very, very enlightening conversation for me, and I am so grateful for your insight and your wisdom, Rebecca. 

[00:29:48] Rebecca Solnit: 

Well, an absolute pleasure talking to you, and I think I got two new essays out of the conversation, so thank you so much.

[00:29:58] Adam Grant: 

I love Rebecca's point that expressions of concern are not expressions of unconcern about other topics. Yes, we can sometimes infer people's values from what they voice, but we should be cautious about reading too much into their silence. The internet doesn't need everyone to speak on every issue. As law professor Tim Wu has observed, “As the world has shifted from information scarcity to information abundance, speech can become a source of censorship through noise, drowning out independent thoughts and novel views.” It's worth pausing to ask, am I informed enough on this topic to hold an opinion, let alone broadcast it, will my perspective truly make a difference?

ReThinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. This show is part of the TED Audio Collective, and this episode was produced and mixed by Cosmic Standard. Our producers are Hannah Kingsley-Ma and Aja Simpson. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Original music by Hansdale Hsu and Allison Leyton-Brown.

Our team includes Eliza Smith, Jacob Winik, Samiah Adams, Michelle Quint, Banban Cheng, Julia Dickerson and Whitney Pennington Rodgers.

[00:31:15] Rebecca Solnit: 

I feel like I am definitely not mansplaining, um, given our relative respective genders, but maybe psych splaining to you. 

[00:31:23] Adam Grant: 

Well, you know, it's funny that you were hesitating around psych splaining because I think you, you coined a new phenomenon that's waiting to be studied by psychologists, and so I think there's an opportunity here to name it.